episode 33 with Aimée Wimbush-Bourque

Aimée Wimbush-Bourque posted a photo last year on Instagram featuring vegetable scraps sprouting from water: garlic cloves, half an onion, the tops of swiss chard and green onions, growing tall, stretching towards the light. It’s a glorious sight – kitchen cast-offs, finding new life. It’s her most popular image, she says, by far.

Aimée is a cookbook author and creator of the blog, Simple Bites. She is also a champion for kids in the kitchen, zero waste living, urban homesteading, and all things colourful. Her clothes are colourful, her food is colourful, even her sprouting table scraps are colourful. Perhaps this love is a reaction to growing up off-grid in the Yukon, where the sun only shone for a few hours each day during the winter months. Maybe it’s her love of the wild outdoors and a desire to pull nature inside. I think it’s her unwavering optimism, for a life where we can all learn to cook, where life can be spent connecting with nature, and vegetable scraps can grow into beautiful, colourful food.

When I spoke with Aimée, I didn’t realize we were creating an episode to air during a pandemic. But here we are, and we couldn’t be in better hands. Anyone who learned to meal plan, ferment food, and run a market stall as a young kid, all without electricity, running water or refrigeration, is the person we want at our side right now. This is Aimée. Yes, it’s all about celebrating a lot with less, gathering together and perhaps taking our food outside, if we can, today on The Food Podcast.